Monday, September 27, 2010

IE 9 still not color managed?

I don't do windows, so I haven't checked it yet, but apparently the new IE 9 beta still doesn't correctly color manage. It will only take images with spaces different than sRGB and translate them to sRGB. It will NOT use the display profile. That is pathetic and you cannot call it color management. Microsoft claims their color management supports v4 profiles. However, this is meaningless if you don't support the monitor profile as barely any image you will find online will have a v4 profile. Many monitor profiles are v4 though so there it would be useful, if only it actually did anything with it. Contrast this with Firefox, that even though it does not support v4 profiles, will use the monitor profile (as long as it is a v2 profile). Here it makes sense to refer to Microsoft's own document from 14 years ago, which makes clear that a browser when encountering a tagged image should respect the image's profile AND convert to the monitor profile.